


Genetic Inheritance

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Or not, POV Sherlock Holmes, Parentlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 18:34:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1097285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sherlock Holmes is presented with the idea of fathering a child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genetic Inheritance

He asked me once, after the first gentle kisses, the sex, the cuddling, the post-coital breakfasts, the soft and private declarations, the weeks, months, years of comfortable togetherness, the proposal, the marriage, the honeymoon, the arguments, the make-up sex - oh _god_ \- the complete and unending loving -- he asked me about children. About being a father.

John would make an excellent parent. He has so many fissures in his heart that only have the ability to leak tenderness and nurturing (I know, I have experienced it), and when he breathes he breathes for everyone else. He would be patient, kind, willing to go through every hideous step, encouraging gently with eagerness but never with impatient urgency. He would become appropriately concerned and hopelessly tamed by sickening domesticity, but never dulled. Not for me.

He would rise each night to comfort it with little protest and although he would become weary in his head, he never would in his heart. John would thrive in that environment - a dangerous life in its own right - and his legacy, his genes would continue for generations, populating the earth with perfect, perfect hand-me-downs of my perfect, perfect John Watson.

Yes. He would make an excellent father.

But there is always the worry, the enveloping, inescapable worry that I would give what I had recieved myself; a childhood of flippancy and distance, crippling in its neglect. I would easily become occupied with murders and cases and, as John would rightly argue, that is no world for a child to grow up in. Would my life affect the baby’s to such an extent that there would be rigorous test after test, inconclusive in all but one thing; an unnatural psychoses? Would john insist that I abandon my work for the sake of one beautiful descendant of himself, that I dedicate more time to activities so, so far out of my area of expertise?

Inexcusably, inevitably, I would become my own father, so impossibly self-absorbed and intolerant that our child would become broken and unnatural and defunct -- well, me. the thought that I could easily marr something with such great potential sickens me; both John and his child would hate me to such a great extent that I would be forced to retreat back into the comforting persona of narcissism and disgust. Unsuitable for everyone but myself.

Worse still, John might insist that it would be my DNA that would be continued, my genetic inheritance that would be forced upon a person destined to be crippled and corrupted by their own mind. While the horrors of parenthood still disturb me, it is the overwhelming guilt at even the merest idea of fathering a child myself that repels me.

When I said once, after the first gentle kisses, the sex, the cuddling, the post-coital breakfasts, the soft and private declarations, the weeks, months, years of comfortable togetherness, the proposal, the marriage, the honeymoon, the arguments, the make-up sex - oh _god_ \- the complete and unending loving -- that I didn’t want children, he shrugged and said, “Okay,” before planting his hands like wings at my back and pressing his mouth to mine so I could taste the remnants of marmalade on his lips. “It was only a thought.”


End file.
